Studio Session 1 Reflection

Prior to today's class I knew very little about the Arab Spring. We had talked briefly about it in my Intro to Digital Media class back when I was a first year and I knew it was sometimes refered to as "The Twitter Revolution," but that was really the extent of my knowledge. In today's session I learned a little more about how it got this nickname. A wave of revolutions took place in Tunisia and Egypt, among other countries in close proximity, in 2011 and it was in large part due to social media. Citizens of these countries had been unhappy with the government for a long time, but it took social media outlets including blogs, Twitter, and Facebook to get the movement going. One article I came across touched on the difficulty of explaining how the Arab Spring occurred. What made it difficult was that there was no clear leader rather, cyber-activism and social media was the leader.